Andrew Palmer is the founder of Elegant Marketplace, which is what he’s mainly known for but he also runs the web design agency, Somebody’s Hero.
He has made huge waves in the WordPress industry with Elegant Marketplace and has been an advocate for Atarim since we started.
So, let’s dive right in and see how Atarim has changed the way he works…
How Did Andrew Approach Web Design Before Atarim?
When Andrew first started out, he used to talk to clients on the phone to discuss amendments – a hangover from his print days.
Over time, they then progressed to email and a lot of customers still liked to use other mediums like text, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
We’re all too familiar with those annoying short messages like – I don’t like the blue, could it perhaps be a bit blue-er?
How Has Atarim Changed Andrew’s Agency?
Well, we’re completing more websites on time, all of the time than ever before.
As far as his web design business was concerned, he was planning to stop building websites altogether. His agency is now capable of shipping far more websites than they ever could before…
We’ve probably built this month 5 projects already and it’s only the 19th. So the average number of projects has approximately doubled. And since we’ve implemented Atarim into our web design process, we’ve 10x’ed our profitability.
Beyond project turnaround time and profitability, Atarim has also made it a lot easier to encourage people to sign clients up to maintenance plans as well because it’s literally support built right into their website.
People know that if they need to get a hold of Andrew or his team to fix or edit something they can easily do so without ever leaving their website.
“I also play golf 3 days a week, again.“
Andrew’s administrative tasks were massive. People used to print out the website and write their feedback on there or you get an email with a JPEG with annotations and you’d have to decipher that.
While now with Atairm, he’s no longer required to interface with my team and understand what clients are saying since my team can safely correspond with them. When people use Atairm he now no longer has to do anything.
The Central Dashboard now acts as his project manager so he doesn’t even need to tell people what needs to be done anymore…
The real result of this which is what matters is that Andrew now only gets emails like “Hi, how are you?” or “Can you give a bit of advice on this?” which are great. Since his time is no longer consumed by task-based work anymore, Andrew can focus on helping clients with work that truly does require his attention to maintain & build deeper relationships with them (rather than get bogged down in the day-to-day of running an agency).
Why Did Andrew Decide To Use Atarim Over The Other Tools Out There?
Andrew Palmer primarily uses WordPress, apart from a few eCommerce stores where Shopify is a better fit…
Other project management software like Asana, Basecamp, and Trello are great for little updates but they’re a terrible experience because you have to log into another system that is completely separate from your actual website to try and explain what’s going on over there. Getting granular in the way that you can do in seconds with Atarim just isn’t possible…
Would Andrew recommend that others use Atarim?
100% as soon as I could get a hold of the first version I knew I wanted this – I knew it would change the way I work with my – circa 300 – clients…
It’s really turned projects around entirely. Installing Atarim on a live client site that had pretty much failed due to the lack of content from a totally non-responsive client of around 6 months – I emailed him to say use this and within ten working days all of the copy, amendments, and images were uploaded, proofed and approved.
And even for clients who are somewhat technically-challenged, they’re able to familiarize themself with the tool in around 5 minutes and encourages them to leave feedback when they have specific comments/changes to request (only).
If you are struggling with getting content out of your clients – please, please, please make use of this tool, it will pay for itself on the first project.
